Ted Kaczynski, the Harvard-trained mathematician who killed three people and wounded 23 others in a series of bombings stretching over 19 years, died from suicide, multiple sources told The Associate Press.
Kaczynski, dubbed “the Unabomber” by media, was found unresponsive in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, early Saturday, the sources said. Emergency responders revived him and took to him a hospital, but he was pronounced dead there later Saturday morning.
The sources spoke with the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about Kaczynski’s death.
Kaczynski, 81, was serving several life sentences at a maximum security prison in Colorado until 2021, when he was transferred to North Carolina because of ill health, as CrimeOnline previously reported. He was suffering from late-stage cancer.
He pleaded guilty in 1998 to the series of bombings, most conducted by mail. Media outlets dubbed him the Unabomber because of the FBI designation of his case: UNABOMB, for university and airlines bomber. Those were his initial targets.
But Kaczynski’s real target was modern life. He left behind academia in 1969 and moved into a remote, primitive cabin in Montana in 1971 because he’d become disillusioned with modern technology and the destruction of the environment. He targeted scientists, lobbyists, a computer store owner, and airlines with bombs he painstakingly constructed in his cabin.
From 1978 until 1996, he was America’s most sought-for domestic terrorist, finally captured after insisting that a major newspaper publish his 35,000-word manifesto — only to have his writing style and ideas recognized by his sister-in-law.
In the end, he wrote in journals found at his cabin, his bombings were conducted as “simply personal revenge.”
“I often had fantasies of killing the kind of people I hated — i.e., government officials, police, computer scientists, the rowdy type of college students who left their beer cans in the arboretum, etc., etc., etc.,″ he wrote.
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[Featured image: FILE – Theodore Kaczynski looks around as U.S. Marshals prepare to take him down the steps at the federal courthouse to a waiting vehicle on June 21, 1996, in Helena, Montana. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)]
